"You may find him quite as eager to be free as you are."
"Do you think so, Winifred? Do you really think so?" she said, rising at a bound to the extreme of elation. Then she crept softly out of the room, purring to herself: "Oh, I hope so; I hope so."
There was a slight elevation to Lady Winifred's eyebrow and the slightest tilt to one of her shoulders. It seemed to suggest that she had ceased to be impressed with the moods and tenses of the other, that it was a pity that men could not see past the surface of things feminine, that Edith's egotism had the noble simplicity of all big things.
"My dear, wasn't Cousin Hal to take his after-dinner coffee here with us?"
It was Sir Gordon Stuckley who spoke as he came into the room. Sir Gordon was known as Lady Winifred's husband. He was a retired army officer and considerably older than his handsome wife. His mind was the amiable repository of everything conventional and commonplace. He walked over to the writing-table and picked up a cigarette.
"He has gone up to say good-night to his father," said Lady Winifred, blotting and folding her finished letter.
"Well, Hal is back," said Sir Gordon sententiously, "and brings his problem with him still unsolved."
"Whose life isn't a problem—'still unsolved'?" said his wife with an enigmatical smile.
"And it's quite difficult enough to face one's own problem, to face one's own mistakes," she continued. "It's rather hard to have to answer for the mistakes of somebody else; mistakes that can't be remedied; can't in the very nature of things. Hal can't help being a half-caste, can he?"
"What is he back for?" asked her husband shortly.